Why go veg?

Choosing to eat vegetarian is not just an ethical decision it is an environmental one. Factory farms use extreme amounts of water and grains and produce tons of CO2 emissions. How much of a difference can a vegetarian diet make?

If everyone went vegetarian just for one day, the U.S. would save 100 billion gallons of water, 70 million gallons of gas and 3 million acres of land. We would also eliminate greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 1.2 million tons of CO2, as much as what all of France produces!

Not ready to go completely vegetarian - make a difference for your family's and the planet's health by choosing to serve at least once vegetarian meal a week. Will this make a difference - you bet! According to Environmental Defense, if every American skipped one meal of chicken per week and substituted vegetarian foods instead, the carbon dioxide savings would be the same as taking more than half a million cars off of U.S. roads.

Celebrate Earth Day this week with a vegetarian meal. Looking for some great vegetarian recipes? Check out www.vegweb.com

Meatless Monday and beyond

Why not do something good for yourself and the environment and go meatless today? Meatless Monday is a national health campaign to help Americans prevent heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer - four of the leading causes of death in America. Leading health experts agree that going vegetarian is the single best thing we can do for ourselves and our families. Healthy vegetarian diets support a lifetime of good health and provide protection against numerous diseases. Not only is going veg good for our bodies, but it is good for the environment. A 2006 report by the United Nations summarized the devastation caused by the meat industry. According to the report, raising animals for food is “one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global. So when deciding on tonight's dinner take advice from Paul McCartney, "The global meat industry and the land and water required to service it is one of the major contributors to global warming. So I would urge everyone to think about taking this simple step (going veg) to help our precious environment and save it for the children of the future." So start with a meatless Monday and try to take it beyond just Monday :)

Go Veg

You might have noticed that all the recipes I've posted are either vegetarian or vegan. My daughter and I are both vegetarians and are semi-vegan. We have made these choices for ethical reasons - we both find the eating of animals cruel, however recent research shows our choice is also good for the planet. Sir Paul McCartney sums it up by saying, “If anyone wants to save the planet, all they have to do is just stop eating meat. That’s the single most important thing you could do. It’s staggering when you think about it. Vegetarianism takes care of so many things in one shot: ecology, famine, cruelty.”

What you eat can have a much bigger impact on the enviroment than what kind of car you drive. Livestock & manure methane directly release greenhouse gases equivalent to what's produced by 33 million cars! Feeding livestock also take a toll on the ecosystem - it takes 7 pounds of corn to add one pound of weight to cattle and growing the grains to feed the livestock uses a lot of fertilizer - 1 pound for every 3 pounds of cooked beef. Livestock also uses a lot of our precious drinking water, it takes 4500 gallons of water to produce 4oz of raw beef.

Give the planet a helping hand by choosing to go veg or by making at least one meal a week vegetarian.